


in fact, we will live

by Scourge of Nemo (Disguise_of_Carnivorism)



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Apocalypse, Awkward Romance, Climate Change, Escape to Space, Gen, M/M, Other, Recovery, Space Opera, Spaceships, ineffable husbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-02 03:10:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19190734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Disguise_of_Carnivorism/pseuds/Scourge%20of%20Nemo
Summary: A few decades after the Nopocalypse, climate change ends the world anyway. (Admittedly, with a boost from a supernatural war.) The Earth will recover. Heaven and Hell won't. And humanity? Is getting its icky fingers all over the galaxy.-OR-Crowley and Aziraphale take that trip to Alpha Centauri. The universe is so much bigger than either of them realized. Especially now that they don't have to look over their shoulders any longer.Humanity got a ride off that rock, thanks to Adam Young, who's now quite possibly a space-and-time-traveling genderfluid savior building a new Earth beyond the stars.Anathema is starting to wish she hadn’t burnt Agnes' manuscript.





	1. Chapter 1

Sometimes, keeping the people you love alive, safe, and with you is more important than winning the battle or saving the day or thwarting or blessing or – anything, really. Sometimes, you just have to step aside, and pour a cup of tea, and watch it all end together. With those people.

Or just the one person, singular. Or, ethereal being, more correctly, as Crowley decided. After the first Apocalypse, and all that followed, and the jaunt to the countryside, and the three decades of jumping at every little noise that sounded vaguely hellish or holy, it didn’t take much for Crowley to convince Aziraphale a second time around, either.

So that’s how Aziraphale and Crowley found themselves watching the world burn through a space station viewing port. 

They had held hands, for longer than a moment. And then they noticed.

"Er," started Crowley, beginning to grip tighter, before Aziraphale could pull away.

"Oh my–" began Aziraphale, and quickly clasped his hands over his stomach.

They stepped apart. They had been trying physical contact lately – say, the last two decades or so – but they were still on arm hooks and knee bumps. Handholding seemed a bit advanced, to Aziraphale’s mind.

The brimstone belched, and a chunk of the Earth the size of Texas began to float off vaguely in the other direction. Crowley tried not to imagine all the screaming and dying. 

Aziraphale sighed. "It's just rather – rather, isn't it?"

"Yeah," said Crowley, lamely. After a long pause, he said, "I'm going to miss… crepes."

"Yes. Crepes. They were so very lovely," Aziraphale said, thinking not just of crepes but of the theater and their cottage in South Downs and the ducks at St. James's and, mostly, of the soft buzz of love that came from Crowley when he looked at those things.

They had both thought that the dominions of God and the Devil stretched far behind the Earth. That the Earth's rules were the universe's rules. The galaxy's rules.

That they just lived in Her fishbowl, no matter how far away they swam.

At first, neither of them said: Perhaps we were wrong. But they both wondered it, throats tight, eyes wondering.

The Earth flashed bright, once, twice, thrice, and Crosley unfurled his wings to keep the light from the angel's eyes. Silly thing wasn't wearing sunglasses. 

After it passed, Aziraphale's fingers stretched and unstretched, as if grasping at something.

“I wonder if this means –” began Aziraphale.

“Yes,” said Crowley.

“You didn’t even let me finish.” 

“Whatever you’re thinking. The answer’s yes, angel.” 

“Well,” Aziraphale harrumphed. “What if I was going to say that, well, that this means heaven is gone? And hell? And that this odd, terrifying limbo we’ve lived in – that it’s, well. That it’s truly over? That I don’t have to worry about…” 

Aziraphale trailed off, finding it difficult to put to words, exactly, the instinctual certainty that heaven’s love was conditional. The knowledge that he had stepped out of line, and that he would continue to do so. And the fear that if he did just one more thing ever-so-slightly out of line, that they’d come for him, and that this time, he and Crowley wouldn’t have time to prepare. 

“Yes,” said Crowley, and took Aziraphale’s hand again. “You don’t.” 

As Heaven and Hell burned their own creations, the angel and demon both felt some weight lift from them. The weights of rules and laws and expectations, of obligations and of punishments. 

They had long been not quite divine or wicked, occult or ethereal. They had been friends, rather. The potential to be something else burned in them now, just beneath their skin.

Their shackles faded away, unnoticed. The Earth smoked its last, for now. And a galaxy opened up before them. 

*

Meanwhile, on Earth, Adam Young was getting the fuck out of Dodge. And he had a few million people with him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam Young is the new Noah.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Adam Young was getting the fuck out of dodge. And he had a few million people with him.

Adam had realized in his forty-odd years as low-level politician and covert Antichrist some things are not worth saving.

The Earth was one of those things. God crafted it with resilience in mind, an improbable rock in a field of lifeless stars and belching gas balls. It spun and it thrived for millennia, against all odds, and it would continue to do so regardless of who decided to save it. 

“Are we fueled up?” he shouted to Anathema, who was running past with an armful of unidentifiable gadgets.

Anathema did not stop. “Yes, yes, just get the damned people on! There are locusts! Locusts!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Uninspired.”

Adam turned in his Ark, a monstrosity of science and magic, and looked out the viewing port to survey the faces below him. Hungry, tired, desperate – these were the last vestiges of humanity.

The metal doors slid open, and he beckoned to them. The people began wandering, eyes wide and lost. Some grabbed his hands, and he smiled at them. 

The six-millennia war between Heaven and Hell had annihilated the forests, poisoned the soil, drained the sea. (Not that humans had needed any help with that.)

The war against humanity was much, much worse. Brimstone crawled up from the depths, smothering oceans. It did not do so with any particular consistency or for any symbolic period of time, because Down There they were Like That. Fire rained from above, for ten days and ten nights. 

At the end of it, the humans were gone, dead, or, in the case of a few lucky rich bastards, fled to Mars. 

The Earth, after all, would recover. As long as humanity departed it. As long as the war against it ended.

As a kid, the battle against slow environmental decline had seemed necessary. Worth it. Adam kept quietly diverting pipelines and planting improbable rainforests well into his early twenties. But as he grew, he realized the full extent of the rot – just how many lives he would have to rewrite to truly deter the handful of coal kings and oil hounds who were wrecking the world. Also, just how much effort it would take to educate people about proper recycling. For heavens’ sake, the Americans didn’t even rinse their bottles. 

Crowley told Adam once that humanity had held the destruction at bay for longer than anyone might expect, and certainly longer than Crowley would have bet. (Not that Crowley'd ever admit so much to Aziraphale.)

But hell was doing good work, and heaven was doing bad work, and humanity was making money, and the Earth was the crux of something bigger than itself.

Adam’s preteen meddling had given it a leap at an extra chance. But there was only so much one castoff son of Satan could do against the legions of hell and the heavenly host.

Sometimes Adam wondered if he needed to destroy humankind after all. If it was his destiny – not to fulfill hell’s mandate, but to save the galaxy from people. But Adam loved humanity, and was determined that it should continue. Even at the cost of, well, anything else. 

He would probably still wonder, as the last sons of God began to hunger, and to covet, and to kill. He suspected they would, even with hell gone.

But it didn’t matter. 

He loved them. 

So he build a spaceship. So he loaded humanity onto it, two-by-two. So he became Noah, and so humanity became his flocks. 

The Earth would recover itself. Eventually. 

In the meantime, Adam Young was off to find some aliens.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on tumblr @ neverfeedthesarcophagi.tumblr.com


End file.
